The First Victory

(See Cover)

If Japan had never existed, the events of last week in Europe would have marked the end of the greatest war in human history. The fact that this war was only part of a still greater war could not diminish its epic size, its overwhelming agony, or its pervasive consequences.

This war was not only the greatest but probably the ugliest in human history. The war in the Pacific is, in some respects, more savage. But the war which swept over almost the whole of Europe, much of Africa and some of the Near East, over the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic, was fought by the peoples who cradled 20th-Century civilization. It was fought with a brutality which exceeded that of primitive times.

Revolution Put Down. This war was a revolution against the moral basis of civilization. It was conceived by the Nazis in conscious contempt for the life, dignity and freedom of individual man and deliberately prosecuted by means of slavery, starvation and the mass destruction of noncombatants' lives. It was a revolution against the human soul.

Not Churchill, nor Stalin, nor Roosevelt, nor any other Allied leader ever really articulated the nature of this war. It was more nearly named by Nazis in such outpourings as Mein Kampf. But the Allied peoples showed that they sensed it by the way they fought--not with great hate but implacably, as men fighting for the existence of their civilization.

And last week the Nazi revolution was put down. It ended, appropriately, with the Nazis fighting from the sewers of Berlin.

No battle ever ended more decisively. It was fought to the finish. The power of those who began it was utterly destroyed. Their armies were annihilated. Every inch of their land was occupied. Their cities, great & small, were largely reduced to rubble. As a people, those who survived were completely beaten and very nearly destitute.

The civilized world, in spite of its unpreparedness, mental, moral and physical, in spite of its lack of understanding and its self-deceptions, its false pride and petty contentions, had finally risen and destroyed its attackers. The price was the destruction of the greater part of Europe's material heritage, the cutting short of several million lives, the maiming of many millions more.

The Big Three, who chiefly accomplished the great task, were the soldiers and peoples of Britain, Russia and the U.S. Each of the three deserves its own particular credit.

It will be to the eternal credit of the British that for a whole year, from the fall of France to the invasion of Russia, they bore the burden of the struggle alone. After Dunkirk, with only one division of troops equipped to put up organized resistance to invasion of the British Isles, they fought on. They continued to fight on, bloody but unbowed, throughout the blitz. Hitler called them "military idiots."

To the eternal credit of the Russians, they willingly paid more heavily in blood than any other nation. From a people who after centuries of oppression have still to taste the real benefits of that civilization or even understand it in the same light as the western world, this was a great contribution.

Americans also paid heavily in blood and sacrifice, but not on a scale comparable to the other two. Unlike the other peoples, Americans were not invaded or directly threatened by the Nazis, but--slowly, haltingly, after argument and contention--they overcame their old belief in isolation and acknowledged that the Nazi attack on civilization was as much their war as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Having made this decision, difficult for them, Americans not only made their contribution in blood and military skill to the defeat of Naziism, they also provided the greatest part of the machinery which overmatched slavery as a tool of war.

Coalition Set Up. The effective coalition of these peoples brought modern civilization through--battered and partly destroyed, but in triumph. And last week, even while its enemies succumbed in Europe, in San Francisco a parliament of the victors was groping toward a stronger and better civilized world. How crude were their efforts, how uncertain their vision was all too evident. Yet men everywhere were so painfully aware of the imperfections of the civilization which had triumphed that perhaps they underrated the triumph's decisiveness.

After the fall of Napoleon, France and Austria were considered two of the greatest powers of the world, but the War of 1870 revealed that Germany, a greater power than either, had arrived upon the scene. And World War II revealed that the U.S. and modern Russia were both greater powers than Germany. The victorious coalition of these two with Britain promises to dominate the world until the next great war--or until mankind can find a better argument than war.

But even if the hopes vested in San Francisco are not fulfilled, World War II should not have been in vain. The Nazi attempt to derail the train of history caused a near-wreck but brought doom upon its perpetrators. After such an overwhelming defeat, the enemies of civilization should not find it so easy to emerge from the sewers. And the victors, having mustered the forces of civilization, will have a stake in preserving them.

The 68 months' struggle is now over. One job is done, one battle won. Civilization is now free to pour its full strength into the other battle, the war against Japan.

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